bighairylaowai.com

My friend Ole (n) is one in a million. Maybe a million and a half. That’s roughly the population of Santai, a relatively small county in Sichuan province, and he’s the only one who needs to shave daily, celebrate Xmas and sit while he sh*ts - he’s the one resident whitey. Although he has constantly visited Chengdu, I have never been out to Santai until 2 weeks ago, and have since been again.

Its always welcome to get out of the city in much the same way as its a pleasure to get back to it. Your bus extricates itself from the encircling tangle of ring roads marking the liveable city, passes through the wheezing chimney stacks and factory yards of the industrial belt and enters into everyone’s image of China proper. The horizon expands until it is boundless, and you are among the wide open farming plains. Vigorous, fecund vegetation strives above the competitive mass and arches shoots across the bows of its neighbour, swamps buildings, infests dividing hedges and threatens to dominate. Narrow, labrynthine chasms are cut into these imposing fields, through which families knowingly weave in order to tend their crops. As the city is left further behind, small hills approach and become rolling mountains, little brothers of the great ranges that enclose the Sichuan basin. Those nearest are pocked with swathes of trees, those in the middle distance coloured with lifeless dull blues, those behind shrouded with the layers of mist that characterise all landmarks in this province to a degree.

The rich greens of the fields become deeper and darker, signs of greater potency. Patches of the lustrous canola crop and several flooded fields break up this threatened uniformity. Shelves are cut wherever the rise and fall of the plains allow it. The condition of the Lodgings contrast sharply with the richness of the environment; it seems rare for any to have more than two complete walls, an intact roof or any windows. Piles of bricks are loaded into gaps, without any adhesive, just as a support, while straw is jammed to insulate any smaller holes. Sheets of corrugated iron, varying between the rich red rust of the older ones and just plain dirty newer ones are patched across the top, in combination with gnarled tarp sheets. Shoals of faded litter flow out by the sidewalls. Whole families are out in force, tending to the crops, scything, collecting produce, carrying supplies or leading cattle. Hefty cattle stand dextrously on slopes and graze (yes Mum, it means their right legs are big and their left legs are little or vice versa).

And so I drew into Santai. It was nothing like I expected. From Ole’s descriptions of a small, tight knit Chinese community and the preceding 3 hours of countryside, I suppose I was anticipating what I can best describe as a hamlet. Instead, it was bigger and more developed, though not too strongly so; it was a dinky, Fisher-Price city. The roads were wide, though not packed with too much traffic, save for a stream of taxis and pedicabs, and lined with trees. Thankfully, the meaning of high rise in Santai only extends to 7 stories or so. A measure of the place was provided when I stepped off the bus and a little girl, her hair manipulated so that she looked uncannily like Pinhead from Hellraiser, sprinted into her mother’s shop and yelled laowai! repeatedly. It seems that Chinese mothers spend hours competing over the condition of their daughter’s hair, pony-tails, pig-tails, beads, braids, bands, buns, sparkles, even tiaras, while the boys are invariably left with the good old flat-top. A 2 kwai (yes, conversion time again - just over 10 pence) taxi and I was at Ole’s school, where he lives on campus. Even though his contract has finished, the school has allowed him to stay at his pad rent-free; one of several perks of his job that almost impelled me to shiv him in any available organ, at least in the first few weeks. And yes, an awesome pad, with a laptop and fast net connection which drew longing gasps from me and worried looks from Ole.

We went out for dinner to meet a fellow teacher of Ole’s. On the way we were hailed by several acquaintances from the shops and stalls lining the way, to which the new hairy one was introduced. We met with Mr Zuo, or Mr Left as his name translates literally, then Ole comandeered a pedicab from its grinning owner to make a withdrawal from the bank. We deliberated over what kind of food we should have, I mentioned not having Hotpot for a while, and this offhand comment having the influence of being from a guest, well that was it and Mr Left began phoning around. He came back with news that the owner of the town’s best hot-pot would be willing to host the resident and the incoming laowai and their Chinese friend, so long as his daughter would be allowed to sit in on the meal with the English speakers. Hotpot is a fantastic social meal. Everybody sits around a basin bubbling with broth and spiced with chilis and numbing peppers. Each individual has their own small dish, in which is mixed oil, vinegar, garlic and herbs. If the Hotpot is cheap, skewers of various meast and vegetables are dipped in the hotpot and left to cook before they are retrieved for eating. During our expensive meal, plates of food were brought by staff and slid into the broth, and removed by us, dipped into our individual dishes and eaten. The cow stomach and pig throat were surprisingly good.

This being one of my rare dinners with a local, the Guanxi (the term for Chinese social customs and networking) was a little overpowering at first. The meal was both hot (wafts face) and also hot-hot (mimics scorching breath), but the only way to drink the ice-cool glass of beer in front of you is to initiate a toast, or otherwise you disrupt the ability of anyone else, especially your host, to initiate a toast as your glass is no longer full and must be refilled. So after the toasts of welcome and the toasts of thanks for such hospitality, it became open season. Mr Left, a good-time guy who grows fonder of the toast as the night wears on, was doing the majority of the running by thanking Ole for bringing me, me for coming, our host for hosting us, that I should enjoy my Chinese experience, that I should come again, that I have so warmly accepted his friendship and various toasts, and in hope that Ole should sign on for a further semester. Ole and I were forced to respond in equal measure to Mr Left and our host, with further toasts to the progress of his non-drinking, growingly amused daughter. Say gambei (approx) to a Chinese companion and he will feel impelled to drain his glass. Ole’s literal translation of this notion in English, bottoms-up, provoked the night’s comedic moment and of course further toasts.

The night moved to Santai’s only bar (where I became the fourth signature on the laowai wall), and Mr Left had to suffer the indignity of losing heavily to two roundeyes at the Chinese national sport, Dojitsu (card game if you’ve not been keeping track of other entries or reading past the second line). This didn’t prevent being invited to Sunday lunch with Mr Left and his family in his plush new flat, where I continued my unfortunate habit of entering Chinese toilets shoeless. A further rookie mistake and Mr Left’s proclivity for the beers somewhat altered the course of the lazy serene afternoon. He filled our glasses with beijio and made the initial welcoming toast - it seemed extreme to sink that much 56% proof spirit, but I thought to obey Guanxi. As I placed my empty glass back down, I received looks of amazement from the other diners who had tactfully taken smaller gulps. Mr Left rescued the situation by refilling the glass and toasting to what he termed as my frankness, and subtly inviting me to relax my pace a little as the others caught up, a solution that I believe was also entirely suitable to Mr Left. Toasts followed in the same fashion as the night before, but of course this was with gut-rotting beijio not p*ss weak Chinese beer. Frankness toasts were common. A briefly disruptive sojourn into polit*cs (see its a nasty word, I put a * in it) between the American ghost (jokingly called of course) and our hosts was concluded in amiable fashion through the toasting of both homelands. The beijio dryed up so Mr Left cracked open the beer without hesitation, to the chagrin of another Chinese teacher, Mr Lee. Mr Lee was soothed with a laowai rendition of The Bobbettes fifties hit Mr Lee

1, 2, 3, Look at Mr Lee
3, 4, 5, Look at him jive,
Mr Lee, Mr Lee, ho! Mr Lee,
Mr Lee, Mr Lee, ho! Mr Lee,
Mr Lee, Mr Lee, ho! Mr Leee-eeee-eeee

This was a little messy. We made our goodbyes and headed to Santai’s tourist site, well, the park. And the laowai were the bandstand act. A few inpromptu games of hoopla at the base, before we climbed a small hill and shattered the tranquility of the pagoda-pond area by chasing children around (it goes without saying-this will be an issue in the UK) carrying them over stepping stones and threatening to dunk them in the pond. A couple of autographs later, we dropped into the primary school Ole guest-stars at, and again the two whiteys proved to be a greater draw than their cartoons, so we terrorised them and chased them around with chalk and board wipers.

2 weeks later I was back. A pleasant dinner with laowai-friendly school principal Jane, Mr Chung and the owner of a computer retail chain was the social event of that Saturday evening. The toasts were of a more banal nature, but I did have the pleasure of Mr Chung telling me I was handsome and did I want to have a Chinese girlfriend because I could very quickly have one, all while his hand was placed on my thigh. The owner of the retail chain clandestinely paid for the bulk of the meal, and when Ole saw him paying for the final round of beers as well, he attempted to intervene and pay our share but was physically blocked from the transaction. The oddities of Guanxi in play again, all well-meaning of course. A swift beer at the only bar in town ™, then home. But upon our intended departure we were signalled over to the owners’ table (a particularly mad woman), where we were plied with endless jugs of beer and toasts and plates of Peking Duck and Seafood. Our response was to hijack the karaoke and sing the available English language classics badly, smoke gets in your eyes, always on my mind, love you more than I can say and so on, before we were asked to stop and the karaoke switched back to Chinese. A measure of the evening was how the owneress’s opinion of the English was downgraded from being more gentlemanly than the Americans to they are just the same! The next 3 hours were purgatorial, as during the onset of a noxious hangover I was forced to select 5000 songs from the 20000 that comprised mine, Ole and Eva’s musical library to put on my iPod. I left Santai the next morning at 10.

Ole has been recently debating whether to stay in Santai a further semester or move on to fresh pastures. During the first teaching role he accepted in China, he was holed up in squalid dwellings in a filthy northern city called Datong, with another two fairly ill laowai, and after much delay, his first teaching assignment was … to marry a local girl and take her back to the United States of Milk and Honey with him so that she could obtain American citizenship. Then he got offered Santai. In such a small place you could get stale, but it’s a cosy nook. The details and perks of his contract far exceed mine and most other teachers. And perversely, despite it being so small and bereft any other laowai, the sense of community and belonging is far stronger. In Chengdu, I am farmed out to different schools and am not truly a member of any. In a major city the laowai is no great shakes. Indeed there is great suspicion of the city laowai; has he come for the money and the indubitable perks of being a foreigner in China, in short for his own blinkered pleasure and surrounded by other closed-minded whiteys. There is no question of this out in a place like Santai, and he is graciously welcomed and his intentions thought noble by both the English speaking locals and the non, particularly emphasised by the fact he is only the second resident they have had. Though I feel like I am regarded on my block as the BFG, in Santai you could go dancing round the lamp-posts like Gene Kelly while the rest of the town comes out as a chorus line and dancing troupe. There is also no city burn-out for Ole, who picks and chooses his weekends, comes to Chengdu and blows sheds of cash, and slinks back to Santai for some R & R. I shouldn’t be going on too much - he has complained about my pro-small town bias clouding his decision-making. But if he doesn’t stay in the closest thing to US sitcom 50’s Suburbia that I have ever seen, and chances on another location, will he accept another Datong?

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